Bitcoin Forum

You don't invest in USD or EURO or etc... you use them. Bitcoin is a currency, and a tool. It wasn't meant for people to make money. People made money holding Bitcoin while it is in growing phase, is simply an abnormality. Once Bitcoin reach user saturation, there probably will be no more such occurrences.

Also Bitcoin may forever be an obscure experimental internet currency, that may never make it mainstream. There are no guarantee that it will become mainstream. So user saturation MAY already happened.

you are wrong. bitcoin is both a currency and investment. that's why it's so special, there has never been anything like it. you can't just say that it's not an investment because you don't want people looking at it that way.

You definitely can invest in USD/Euro. That is what people do on forex...

No, you don't invest in USD/EUR pair, you speculate. Forex trading is a zero sum game. My point is that Bitcoin does not reliably produce wealth, it is a currency, similar to speculating on forex. At some point, user numbers will reach saturation, and Bitcoin will no longer produce any returns (except maybe due to deflation).

are you really this fucking retarded?

YES you CAN and people DO invest in the USD/EURO etc. infact, people even make a living doing this.

here let me give you the retarded thread of the year award

It is not. Governments end up paying.
But don't feel bad for them, since they can create money out of nothing.

What is Investment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment)

In finance, investment is putting money into an asset with the expectation of capital appreciation, dividends, and/or interest earnings.

Bitcoin has great potential to increase the world's wealth!

Bitcoin improves efficiency and cuts-out middle men in banking, mobile payments, and international remittance.  It allows people to exchange value instantly, and, unlike cash, it doesn't require two people to be in the same physical spot or to have the correct change.  It will allow the world's "unbanked" to more easily save and it gives all people a sense of privacy and monetary freedom that has never existed before.

And this is only the money aspect of bitcoin.  With coloured coins and smart contracts, who knows what else we will accomplish.  

So, just like how advances in robotics increased the world's wealth by improving manufacturing efficiency, bitcoin will increase the world's wealth by improving monetary efficiency.  

It is emphatically not a zero-sum game.  Later investors increase the value of early investors holdings, giving them the financial power to take time away from their day jobs and put energy into furthering the bitcoin network.  It is really an incredible market-driven funding mechanism unlike anything that has ever existed before!

    

Well good afternoon to you too, sir.


I think OP is making some valid points. Usage is the next challenge. All fair and well to sit on
a pile of BTC worth alot of FIAT in your head, but it's the FIAT Bitcoin can finally rid us off.
Therefor we need to eventually start using the damn things for buying stuff, paying labour, all
the things we now use FIAT for.

Also, the point he make saturation might already have happened is also possible. Maybe the masses
will not like the system and won't use it. Then this is the BTC-economy size right now. I personally
don't think this is the case. I think it'll get much wider adoption, regarded that the learning curve for most
people is still tough. Try to get average Joe making a cold wallet.

So people who bought bitcoins in 2010 and saw 1000% returns aren't allowed to say that they made a good investment? They put money in a commodity (gold 2.0) and they came out with more money through appreciation.. sounds like an investment to me.

Agreed.  This new "mantra" everyone's talking bullshit about "Bitcoin is a store of value not a currency" is utter bullshit.  Proof of that is whats happening in the market.  Bitcoins VALUE is going to be in its capability to facilitate trade and transactions.  

The market trading is an irritating distraction at best, from what Bitcoin is.  I dare say it has nothing to do with Bitcoin whatsoever.  Its simply an interface for annoying day trader types and clueless investors to try and make money.  They are the reason bitcoin seems "volatile".  Bitcoin is not the reason.  Bitcoin hasn't changed.  People's bi polar frantic-buys and panic-sells are what keep changing.  And its that nonsense - treating Bitcoin as an "investment" which is making things so volatile, and giving Bitcoin a bad name.  

Bitcoin is not just a "store of value".   Its a currency.  No matter what people want to think.


Bitcoin itself is NOT an investment.  The trading interface where people are assigning speculative value to it, is where the investment is.  As I understand it, Bitcoins only "investment" aspect is its overall deflationary behavior.  But that is not reflected in massive spikes and crashes.  It is something that changes over long periods of time.  What you are commenting on is a bunch of humans outbidding eachother on something.  That's different.

Stop trying to dictate how others view Bitcoin

I think its an investment, if it increases in value..

I consider Bitcoin to be mainly an investment but would like to see it more as a currency, as soon as I can order basic essentials online, groceries etc and pay the electric bill with BTC then Bitcoins role will change and there will be less speculation trying to make profit on it's changing value.

Bitcoin is what it's users perceive it to be, not what it's creator intended it to be.

Remember:

Bitcoin is still in beta.

2,100m bitcoins are not all the produced, not saturated

Really so is that why stores in Utah accept it because it can't be used as a currency?

Still a great speculation vehicle  :P

it can be treated as an investment though the trick to it is holding enough coin when its starts being used a currency

Nice advise. The Chinese will appreciate it  ::)

They are both and for 80% of people including me it is an investment with a great risk reward ratio. Everybody wants to make money and doing that whilst helping a good thing to succeed? Priceless

Bitcoin encourages saving and a little spending, the governments encourage no fiat saving and wreck less spending into indebtedness

In the 1990s, those Russians who invested in USD, became rich after the ruble (RUR) crash.

I don't understand all the venom thrown at the op.

He made a clear argument that bitcoin is a currency, and you can get rich speculating on a currency, such speculation is gambling rather then an investment. That speculation in of itself does not produce wealth, only transfer wealth from those who bet correctly to those who bet wrongly (just using dollars because "everyone is" is still betting, you are speculating on dollars)

He didn't even argue that people shouldn't gamble on bitcoin being a success. only that such an act should be called "currency speculation" and not "investing".

And people are attacking him personally arguing that he is attacking bitcoin. Even though he is clearly a supporter of it.

Are you really so much in need of calling someone retarded just because you disagree with him?

You can invest money into money, I believe, though this sounds more like a conversion to me.

bitcoin is whatever we make it

You are missing the point entirely.

The guy argued the semantics of the term investment. Arguing that currency speculation should not be called an investment but be called currency speculation, nothing more nothing less.

IMO, Bitcoin is not a Currency, but is a Digital Commodity that people want to own. Bitcoin is no more a currency than Pogs or Beanie Babies are currencies.

And since people invest their money into Bitcoin with the hopes of turning a profit through Appreciation, I would consider Bitcoin an investment as well.

You can invest your money in EURO or USD or any other currency if you want. You can invest your money in potatoes or tulips as well. There are plenty of people  who make good livings off trading various currencies with each other.

Yes, BTC is a currency, but people are investing their money in it by speculating on the value. At BTC's peak I was up nearly 1000%. I plan on holding it for the future in the hope that it does become a mainstream or more wildly accepted currency, which I believe it will, then I will begging to spend it and/or possibly sell it for GBP. I think people can use it or do with it what they want, and that includes using it as an investment or even a get rich quick scheme.

Sounds like you don't like the price of bitcoin going up!! Well that's too bad for you then. Bitcoin is the peoples money currency it will continue to become worth more and more dollars. You should be more worried about USD and the EURO as there is trouble brewing at the Federal Reserve and we could see the start of a implosion of the USD by April of next year. The markets as we know them today would collapse, the collapse in 2008 proved just how interconnected the markets are to one another; we live in a globalized marketplace.

It is a currency. Is the USD and other fiats no more a currency than Pogs or Beanie Babies too?

Bitcoin is a currency, which also makes it an investment oppourtunity for some.....whole companies are set up to trade Forex and make money off price swings, just as they do with stocks and shares etc.

People saying it speculating or a gamble....that is the definition of an investment....you put your money into something with the hope that you see a return on your investment...no-one is ever 100% sure on an investment, so that makes it a gamble or speculative.

And im sure a lot of people on this forum have made very large returns on their investments over the last couple of years.

Kokojie you are equipped with a high level of intelligence but these days investors have got too crazy for a digital currency bitcoin which wasn’t formed for profit but now days everyone is holding to book a profit for himself and then leave bitcoin alone. Bitcoin has turned highly volatile due to these investors who are greedy for making money for themselves. 

Actually government encourages saving, because your savings lose value over time.

Bitcoin itself doesn't encourage saving, but won't lose value over time.

google "forex" before you write silly things like this

it doesn't matter what people classify or even label as what constitutes an investment. if you store some of your hard earn wealth in it, and it grows over time then that is an investment. If one person can find a way to grow his wealth through pink elephants then that is an investment.

Bitcoin is an investment because it can (and has) been to used to grow a store of wealth over time. People label it as a none investment doesn't actually matter. sorry

and yes people invest in fiat currencies all the time and make profits off it.

You also have no evidence of your assumption of saturation or that there will not be any more occurrences of the price rising.

Ignorance is bliss because you are always right.

I think he meant encourages with their policy not with their words, the two differ because they are liars

I think, I understand the root problem:

OP and couple of other users argue that holding and trading of Bitcoins does not produce wealth; therefore, it is not an investment.
I do agree, that it doesn't produce wealth.
However, definition of investment says nothing about wealth, it only states that investment will appreciate the value.
Therefore, if Bitcoin (or any other asset) appreciates in value, it is an investment.

You may use USD or Euros but that doesn't mean other people don't do other things with them. If people want to invest in bitcoin then they are investing in bitcoin. Maybe the argument can be made that it's not a good investment.

any sort of investment is pretty much a "Transfer of wealth" one way or the other, when you're buying real-estate, gold, silver , etc etc if you are defining things this way it's all gambling as the price can go up or crash down.

Remember - "beta" status is meaningless in software engineering. A software can be published for public or not. That's it. It is not possible to fix all bugs in a project.

I've put money in to it, so I'm calling it an investment. I could lose money, but I've still invested it in BTC.

No, if that was the case then we would all still be living in caves.
Wealth can be created, it can be destroyed, and it can be transferred.


If you spend your money to start a company that manufactures something then your investment has created something, that is producing wealth. If you hire contractors to build a house where none existed before, you created wealth. When you write software you create wealth. A farmer growing corn is creating wealth.

If a city is bombed or burned down then wealth is destroyed. A car or a tracktor wearing down over the years of use is wealth being destroyed, a house rotting away over the years is wealth being destroyed. A HDD failure making you lose the sourcecode for your software is wealth being destroyed. A person eating corn is destroying wealth.

Speculation is buy low sell high... or at least attempting to. Everything you gain by buying low and selling high, someone else lost by buying high and selling low.

Usually speculation doesn't occur in a vacuum and is married to production. They finance the creation of new wealth (company that sold the stock has more capital to invest in machinery or raw materials), but they also facilitate the transfer of wealth between individuals (value swings on the stock market).

In bitcoin terms:
mining = create wealth as new coins are created
destroying a wallet containing coins = destroy wealth (well, lose it, probably permanently)
buying low selling high & vice versa = transfer of wealth. For every $ you make on buy low sell high, someone has lost exactly the same amount of dollars buy selling low and buying high.

PS. I do not support the op's notion that speculation isn't an investment. Nor do I think that the existence of speculation is bad. Since people who speculate inadvertently also finance wealth creation

The bolded part is key.  Right now people are investing (call it speculating if you want) in the prospect that bitcoin is not at its saturation point and that it will continue to climb to some saturation point.  That is an investment as surely as is someone putting money into a startup company.  It is a high-risk investment, but an investment just the same.  When bitcoin does in fact get near and/or reach that saturation point, then your comparison to trading USD/EUR will be accurate.

I suspect that using Bitcoin in the manner that the OP prescribes/demands/dictates/whatever would probably kill it (as a interesting an promising solution adhering to some modicum of decentralization) faster than any realistic attack.

In the mean time, it's proven quite an attractive and lucrative vehicle for high risk speculation.  And doing so (and thus acting as a buffer of sorts for in the highly volatile market space) has at least the potential to facilitate a better distribution.  Happy days!

It is an investment. (Some) Users buy bitcoins to see the value go up and sell them. Thus investing in them. Please see the definition below. Thank

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This is the kind of stuff People need to do with the various
Cryptocoins I believe they each have their own Value
and we need to let the World Market decide exactly
what that value is.

I believe if we went to our local Grocery Store, Hardware
Store, Computer Store, etc... to Invite them to learn more
about People that are using their computers to create Money,
Commodities, Equities,

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The REAL value in Bitcoin is not in the price speculation, get rich quick schemes or trading the crazy price volatility but rather in its value as a MONETARY UTILITY in the exchange of goods and services.
 
With the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world above $70 Trillion fiat dollars I would think there is plenty of room for a few competing currencies like Gold, Silver and of course for online transactions...Bitcoin!
 
Apparently so does Overstock.com as they just announced that they will start accepting Bitcoin...
 
Overstock.com Will Start Taking Bitcoin Next Year
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/overstock-com-start-taking-bitcoin-191550579.html
 
So in the 2nd quarter of 2014 I will be able to buy any of the 984,000 items that Overstock.com offers...with a click of a mouse paying no transaction fees to the banksters!
 
Hmmm...
 
I wonder how long before Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, etc figure out that accepting Bitcoin can increase their market share, add to their revenues and drastically decrease their banking expenses?
 
The battle to retake our financial system is in full view of the world now.
 
In 2014 EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE!

Bitcoin is memory:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234731.0